past that he experienced as a young man, and that started disappearing precisely through being experienced, offers an idealized version of a society full of colourful characters, scents, sounds and colours. An increasing consciousness of the oppressive regime that dominated that beautiful world “ruins” it for Manuel. What the narrator really longs for is an experience of youth, of discovering the world, in an environment that would be both exactly the same as that of his childhood and (paradoxically) different, because it would not be marred by dictatorship. His awareness that what he longs for never really existed, or existed only so long as he, a child, still unquestioningly accepted the francoist value system, is the source of his nostalgia.
THE PAST AS A FORBIDDEN FRUIT
It would seem, then, that Tranvía a la Malvarrosa is a novel in which nostalgia indeed functions ethically by confronting what should have been with what was. Yet at the same time the narrator betrays a pleasure in the darker sides of his childhood. In a remarkable chapter of Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, young Manuel becomes so fascinated by a criminal law case that he decides to turn it into fiction, thus performing his first act as a writer. After telling us that his young alter ego “recreaba el crimen como un acto más de la agricultura” (recreated the crime as just another act of agriculture), the narrator goes on to reproduce the result of that recreation (90). The story deals with the retarded El Semo, who rapes and kills his pretty young neighbour Amelita, a deed that sparks off debates as to whether he is capable of distinguishing between good and evil, and leads inevitably to his execution. In the story as told in Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, the murderer does not repent his crime, since to him Amelita, just like all the fruits and vegetables around him, was simply ripe and ready to be consumed. The description of the murder is highly lyrical and, once again, sensory perception dominates. Surrounded by fragrant flowers,
[e]l Semo le puso la zarpa en el cuello y aún gruñó su vulgar deseo con cierta timidez, pero Amelita se revolvió bruscamente y la lucha continuó sobre la hierba en una extensión de margaritas. Los dorados insectos celebraban mínimas cópulas de amor muy puro en los árboles. La luz de la tarde iluminaba la lucha de los cuerpos envueltos en voces de auxilio y blasfemias. (90-91)
(el Semo put his claw to her throat and still groaned out his vulgar desire with a certain timidity, but Amelita turned around brusquely and the fight continued in the grass on a stretch of daisies. In the trees, the golden insects celebrated minimal copulations of very pure love. The afternoon light illuminated the struggle of the bodies entangled in cries for help and blasphemies.)
The crime takes place in beautiful, intoxicating, erotic surroundings, complete with copulating insects that suggest how natural an urge the violent rape really is. Even though the narrator does not try to disguise the brutal nature of the act, he accords it a primitive beauty. Moreover, the end of the story suggests that the deed was not really evil: to the simple-minded El Semo, it was, indeed, “just another act of agriculture”.
Interestingly, the portrayal of this evil deed in a paradisiacal setting mirrors the acknowledgement of the less pleasant aspects of francoism within an otherwise overwhelmingly nostalgic and romantic rendering of the past. In both cases, the narrator points out that, morally speaking, francoism or the rape and murder of a young girl are to be rejected. Yet because the boy who accepts the dictatorship, and the simple-minded man who kills the girl, are both in their own way innocent, they can only be rebuked, but cannot be judged evil. Young Manuel has grown up in beautiful surroundings (as they are nostalgically portrayed) of which Franco’s dictatorship formed a natural part. Similarly, Amalita is completely integrated into El Semo’s equally idyllic surroundings and has, for him, the same status as any ripened orange. The story of El Semo can be read as a sort of mise en abyme of the novel as a whole. The narrator’s account of the brutal killing does nothing to undermine the beauty of the scene. If anything, this touch of decadence heightens it.
Alhough the narrator of Tranvía a la Malvarrosa is a critical nostalgic who knows and demonstrates that the past he pines for is not as perfect as he likes to remember it, he is nevertheless seduced by nostalgia and its emotional impact. This is what Linda Hutcheon has termed nostalgia’s “emotional weight”: “[N]ostalgia is not something you ‘perceive’ in an object: it is what you ‘feel’ when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight” (199). Vicent’s narrator obviously suffers its consequences. Though he lets himself be overcome by nostalgia, he still maintains a critical distance to it. Yet the nostalgic narrator also seems to derive a certain pleasure from the realization that the past was not perfect, but putrid. The exquisite sounds and colours, the delicious scents all gain an extra clarity by the very fact that they disguise something rotten just below the surface.
Nostalgia’s emotive force undermines the apparent dominance of the narrator’s democratic value system over the dictatorial values he espoused in the past. Still, the modern value system would remain intact if what was longed for was an idealised version of the francoist past in which francoism itself had no place. In Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, the hierarchy of value systems is turned upside down by the importance accorded to sensory perception and eroticism. While they induce Manuel to break away from the values and norms of Catholicism and Franco’s Spain in the 1950s, they also lend a sense of perversion to the narrator’s nostalgic longing. Decay is inherent in the longed-for past. What the narrator really longs for is not a childish state of innocence, but the exact moment at which that perfection culminated and started its decline.
Nostalgia, then, involves a kind of haunting. Trauma leaves its traces precisely in the beauty that is evoked. Paradoxically, the fact that trauma’s presence putrefies the otherwise perfect nature of the past has a seductive rather than a repellent effect. Since trauma rides on the waves of nostalgia, it becomes an inextricable part of the emotional overflow to which nostalgia gives rise. Despite partaking in the evocation of nostalgic sentiments, however, the ghost of trauma successfully manages to undermine the ethical setup in Tranvía a la Malvarrosa. The narrator constantly criticises his own nostalgia for the dictatorial past, yet what attracts him most to it is precisely the trace of trauma that corrupts it. At the end of Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, the reader is left with the sense that the narrator’s past is now a forbidden fruit. Morally despicable, it is seductive precisely because of the “bad” francoist value system it contains.
John Su’s ethical structure, in which nostalgia is seen as a framework that encapsulates trauma, is thus deconstructed by the seductive emotionality of the narrator’s nostalgia. As it turns out, the novel’s nostalgia is not nearly as ethical as might appear at first sight. Does this also render Tranvía a la Malvarrosa more eligible for the status of world literature than might at first be assumed? On the one hand, the longed-for past and the specific trauma evoked in Tranvía a la Malvarrosa remain firmly rooted in the local. Yet the pleasure that accompanies nostalgic memory does seem to rise above this national rootedness, going in this case beyond the collective memory of Spain and focusing more on the nature of individual – one might even say human – remembrance. Nostalgia, despite its rootedness in place and time, always brings to a literary work a greater “global potential”.
WORKS CITED
Cook, Pam. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London: Routledge, 2005.
Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern.” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory. Eds. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 189-207.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. “Time Against Time: Or the Hypermodern Society.” Hypermodern Times. Trans. Andrew Brown. Eds. Gilles Lipovetsky, Sébastien Charles and Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity,
